Saturday 21st June 2014

4227/17146

My nutritionalist has advised me to eat more vegetables and less fruit (I eat a lot) and yoghurts (I eat an average and normal amount) so this morning I attempted her suggestion to make my morning porridge savoury by adding vegetables. I griddled up some asparagus and a courgette and added it to the pasty, salty porridge that I had soaked overnight, along with seeds and nuts. It was quite different to my former breakfast of milky porridge (though I only used skimmed milk)with grapes, blueberries, seeds and nuts. It was certainly a lot harder to eat. It was strange but not entirely unpleasant, but just very hard to get through. But aware that I was out for most of the day I thought it was a good idea to get some of my vegetable quota in in the morning. And I have to say that it certainly kept me full up until my 2pm lunch. I was feeling quite pleased with myself until @olliebean on Twitter informed me that a courgette was in fact a fruit so I might not have fulfilled my brief anyway.

I am not sure how long I can keep this up (and it gets more extreme next week when I will be replacing porridge oats with oat groats - just waiting for them to be delivered). I am quite enjoying the novelty as well as the hardship of eating an Oliver Twist style breakfast (with the Richard Twist of asparagus and nuts) and it's showing results. I have dropped over a kilo in a couple of days and am under 83kg for the first time in six years. I am not sure I buy everything that the nutritionalist is telling me (especially the stuff about yoghurts) but I can't see it can do my any harm to be eating a lot more vegetables. I don't know how viable this lifestyle is in the long term, but I am happy to give it a go for now.

We were in an office in central London most of the day, trying to cast the Rasputin play. We saw some good people, though no definite decisions made as yet. But it was nice to hear some of the play read out to find that certainly some of it is funny, though it did also expose other bits that were weaker and there's little as cringeworthy as to having the same clanking bit of dialogue read to you over and over again throughout a day and not being able to change it. One or two of the actors expressed concern about how much work I still had to do, not that I needed to be reminded, but I assured them it would be OK. This is a job for actors willing to roll up their sleeves, take on the challenge and be ready for some changes. I think most of them relished that. But it confirmed my feeling that you can write for as long as you like, but until you have the script being read out by the people you know are going to be doing it then you can't really get a feel for it. I hope to nail the script by the end of the first week of rehearsal (we start rehearsing on 30th June!), which is a lot earlier than I nailed the script for my last play.

So I probably slipped a couple of rungs back down that six point list of writing, feeling justly scared again. Tomorrow will be a vital day. We're edging closer, but still a long, long way to go.